Whether the WRR used Sarcee or the current alignment, it was always going to involve a few kms of E-W to link the Bow and Elbow crossings.
Sarcee was certainly a plausible route, but it would have needed to be more firmly designated well before everything to the west built up so much (with generally affluent folks at that). For most of Stoney Tr communities are much further set back (Woodbine/Cedarbrae being a notable exception, but at least that's only on one side of the RR). The road would fit, but not with 60m+ (often 150m+) buffers on each side like the rest of Stoney.
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Originally Posted by timun
And, amusingly, an even older plan for a ring road had Sarcee Trail cross the river through Edworthy Park and link with Shaganappi Trail. That was still tentatively on the books until the 1970s. The plan changed as the city grew further out, just as the Sarcee Trail NW plan was abandoned for the current alignment.
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I recall hearing about the Sarcee-Shaganappi connection again in the 90s...presumably not a part of the ring road at that point, but thankfully it didn't go anywhere.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
It isn't, because that clearly wasn't the point I was making and you focused on the wrong part of the sentence. 
If the court system is overburdened (which was the justification for the disastrous 'administrative penalty traffic court' nonsense -- not a comparison), the last thing we need is to start issuing tickets that are difficult for the Crown to prove and result in a lot of people challenging them. If you're issuing a citation, you should have a solid foundation for doing so. Otherwise you are just throwing #### at the wall and seeing what sticks, and that's not how the justice system is supposed to work either. You said "Even if 50% of the tickets get thrown out, make the jerks go through that hassle", how the hell is that an acceptable use of our court system? If they get thrown out, how are they the jerks? I mean, it kinda makes you the jerk for making them have to take time off work to go fight a charge that hadn't a snowball's chance in hell in the first place. It is wasting the court's time too.
Edit: Just in case, I hope this didn't come off too dickish or "Listen here, idiot" because I didn't mean it that way. My concerns, in no particular order, are ensuring the court system has the capacity to deal with the cases before it, ensuring that citizens have confidence in the police and related orgs and that they aren't just there to extract as much money out of / exact as much misery upon them as is legislatively permissible, and that resources are put toward solutions that are genuinely capable of addressing real problems. A program like ticketing for noise where there's barely any confidence that the charge will even stick runs afoul of all three, and as I said, people would be surprised to learn what they hear that is actually a perfectly legal exhaust note -- spend any time around domestic sports cars and exotics, and you'll notice the factory spec ones are still pretty in-your-face, but legal. The above is much the same reason I get incensed over preposterously low speed limits in areas (like Glenmore EB at Stoney / Sarcee); they purport to be about 'safety' but they create a larger speed differential amongst drivers than just having a consistent 80 KM/H speed limit throughout the entire stretch. |
I think we both misinterpreted throwaway lines that didn't articulate exactly what we meant (I just wasn't super clear on your objection). I like fast loud cars, too - in the right places (and when driven considerately elsewhere).
My concern is simply disincentivizing jerks from ruining everyone's nice time by hammering their throttles unnecessarily. It seems like we're letting perfect be the enemy of good in terms of this kind of enforcement - I don't think it would actually clog up the courts or that existing failures of the traffic system are a valid reason to avoid making our city more enjoyable for the 99% of people who aren't jerks.
I would hope that our tech is reaching a point where we can have multi-directional video/audio recordings that could demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt who was the 'perpetrator'. Every regulation runs the risk of punishing innocent (or mostly innocent) folks - you can technically get a ticket anytime you go 1kph too fast (especially in one of the silly locations you mention) or your parking meter expires by 2 minutes.
Most of us will face a handful of these inconvenient 'injustices' in our lifetimes...I won't lose any sleep over the small proportion of 'unjust' tickets that might come from this (my 50% remark being hyperbole).